My co-author Joseph McGinty and I are delighted to have received our contributors copies of the new anthology We Shall Be Monsters, pictured below with its original inspiration. Edited by multiple Aurora Award winner Derek Newman-Stille and published by Renaissance Press, We Shall Be Monsters commemorates the bicentennial and legacy of the ground-breaking and genre-changing novel Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The anthology features 24 stories and poems by diverse authors from around the world, ranging from direct interpretations of Shelley’s text to innovative explorations of stitched, assembled body, and narrative experiments in monstrous creations.

The New Year is kicked-off with the publication of our new story “F. — A Post-Modern Prometheus” by yours truly and Joseph McGinty, about a hapless modern day Victor Frankenstein struggling to raise funding for his monstrous research. The story appears in the new anthology We Shall Be Monsters, edited by multiple Aurora Award winner Derek Newman-Stille and published by Renaissance Press, which commemorates the bicentennial and legacy of Mary Shelley’s groundbreaking novel. We Shall Be Monsters is available in paperback and ebook.

My contributor copies of Compostela: Tesseracts Twenty arrived a few days ago. Edited by Spider Robinson and James Alan Gardner, Compostela is an anthology of speculative fiction that represent a futuristic view of the sciences and how humanity might be affected (for better or worse) by a reliance on technology. The collection includes my story “Plot Device” and work by David Clink, Miki Dare, Steve Fahnestalk, Matthew Hughes, Rati Mehrotra, Derryl Murphy, Susan Pieters, Alexandra Renwick, Rhea Rose, Robert J. Sawyer, and 23 other visionary Canadian writers.

“So come on, science fiction! Despair may be the trend du jour among the mundane masses, but we’re supposed to see farther. The stars are waiting for patiently for us to get over ourselves and come visit.”

- From the Foreword by James Alan Gardner

“We may be feeling a bit gloomy just now, but we have every excuse to hope if we want to. Depends on what we choose to sing as we walk our separate Compostelas together.”

- From the Afterword by Spider Robinson

Just arrived copies of Science Fiction by Scientists: An Anthology of Short Stories edited by Michael Brotherton and published by Springer. The collection features fourteen stories by scientists, engineers and other writers with a technical background and includes work by Ken Wharton, Jennifer Rohn, Andrew Fraknoi, Edward M. Lerner, Tedd Roberts, Jed Brody, Marissa Lingen, J. Craig Wheeler, Stephanie Osborn, Jon Richards, Carl Frederick, Les Johnson, J.M. Sidorova and yours truly. For a sampler of the stories, have a look at “Down and Out” by Ken Wharton or an excerpt of my story “Fixer Upper”.